


War Memorial

by nicotinedragon



Category: Invisible Inc. (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 06:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5152907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicotinedragon/pseuds/nicotinedragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are a security guard at one of the FTM facilities. You are on the night shift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Memorial

It’s 23:30, on the thirteenth of April, 2074.

You are a security guard at one of the FTM facilities. You are on the night shift. Twelve hours a day, five days a week. Tomorrow will be your second day off for the week. What days you have off float depending on manning issues in your office. You traded with Will so he could run a marathon, otherwise you’d be off today. It’s a Friday.

It’s very quiet. It always is. Normally, you don’t walk the floor. Tonight, due to manning issues, you are a third tier responder. If the alarm gets up to level three, you will start to patrol.

Until then, you will monitor the security cameras and write that threat assessment about religious and national extremism in Tirana. It’s due tomorrow morning, which would be the end of your shift.

You are not in Albania; you are in San Antonio. But, you spent a year in Belgrade a few years back as a contractor for K&O and you wrote a white paper on Balkan war memorials once, so you know more about Tirana than your regional manager, who has never left the FTM region his entire life. He doesn’t want to look like a fool in front of _his_ boss, so you write the assessment, which was requested as a personal favor from your boss’s boss’s brother-in-law, who works for K &O.

Everyone you work with thinks you’re a wimp because you’ve never told them about Belgrade, how bad it was, because you’re not allowed. It’s classified. You’ll be deprogrammed if you talk about Belgrade. People just know you were there. They don’t know anything else about it. You haven’t been the same since Belgrade, your mother says. You tell her it was boring there. Sometimes, you show her pictures of war memorials. You weren't a wimp until Belgrade.

Normally, there’s a 72-hour turnaround for requests for information, but this doesn’t go through the normal channels.  Your boss’s boss’s brother-in-law is having some sort of emergency and needs a threat assessment on Albanian extremists.

You were promised some recognition and exposure for getting this done, which might contribute to some analysis training courses down the line. You stopped believing that a long time ago, when you accepted the contract in Belgrade. You didn’t get promoted then, either. You never do. You’re not allowed to put that time on your resume. It makes you look lazy.

Threat assessments are very specific. You assess the probability of Albanian extremists attacking K&O Security facilities as low. You have to back this assessment with documentation, so you look up documents to support your analysis.

While you sit there, reading translated newspaper articles, the alarm tracker advances and security cameras boot up.  This morning, your mother called you and broke the news that your beloved pet dog has cancer and wanted to discuss euthanasia. In that heart-wrenching moment, all you could think about were Japanese school children.

It hasn’t been a good day.  You sneak some liquor from your water bottle. You’ve been attending AA meetings, not because you have a drinking problem, but so someone would talk to you for a change. You saw a man nearly die of an alcohol-induced seizure there. You haven’t been back. You work strange hours, so you don’t have many friends. Your mother worries about your social life. Your brother calls you ‘Nightcrawler’. You haven’t seen the sun since daylight’s savings.

From the cameras, you think you see something weird, so you zoom in. Nothing. Must be a weird shadow or something. You look at the building layout and see a few doors open and close with nobody to open or close them. Sometimes they glitch.  

You think about ghosts. You swear up and down the facility is haunted. It’s not a part of San Antonio, per say, it’s actually an old military base. Sometimes, you visit the museum on post. You once wrote a threat assessment on the likelihood of Branch Davidians attacking FTM facilities. Branch Davidians have never attacked FTM facilities; they hoarded weapons in the desert and kept to themselves. You said as much to your boss. He got a promotion briefing the information you prepared.

He promises you credit all the time. He almost never delivers. You’re not allowed to tell him to get bent. People make you anxious, so you’re too scared to tell him anyway. You write assessments to pass the time and because he tells you to.

The Alarm tracker advances again. You save your work and put your body armor on. You turn the transporter on and get ready to leave this tiny room where you usually spend your twelve hours. The computers aren’t allowed to be left alone, ever, unless you lock them down and alarm the doors and all sorts of other stuff. It takes a long time to do. More than once, you’ve shut the office down to go on patrol only the alarm tracker to reset for the rest of the night. Your boss was angry with you. He took two weeks pay.

You can’t afford chemotherapy for your dog. Japanese school children.

When you were in Belgrade, Serbian nationalists didn’t attack you. They surrounded your facilities and resolved to starve you out. They cut power to the facility. It was boiling hot in the summer and people actually froze to death in the winter. Snipers made you fear windows. Improvised explosives made you jumpy. The most consistent thing was the hunger.

You were down to one meal a day. Then you were down to a meal every three days. No showers, couldn’t afford to waste water. 444 days. You and your friends ate the birds, the rats, the dogs. Resupply became dangerous, so it was rare. Mail could still get through for a while, so your platoon had family send food, water, medicine, anything. What you couldn’t use, you could trade. It didn’t last; the nationalists caught on quickly.

Locals would trade with you, but otherwise wouldn’t help. You were an invader that couldn’t be bothered to learn the language. Your pronunciation of simple words was terrible and you couldn’t read. Stupid corporate pawn.  You speak better Serbian these days, but don’t have anybody to speak with.

By the time FTM had sent reinforcements, you were so thin you resembled a child wearing your father’s uniform. You were so delirious from combat, cold, and hunger that by the time reinforcements did arrive, on the 445th day, you threw yourself at their commander in a big hug and cried with relief. Almost instantly, you remembered you weren’t supposed to do that, but he laughed it off and asked where you were from. He told you the results of the Super Bowl and gave you a few news updates.

He smelled like whiskey. You didn’t care.

You named your dog Milosevic. You call him Milo. His bad luck brought him good luck. He had mange, so nobody thought it was safe to eat him. After a while, the mange didn’t matter to them, so you had to hide him. You shared your tiny rations with him for over a year, traded bullets for medicine for him.

You might have gone crazy, risking starvation or even murder for a dog, but you would have shot yourself without him. Things got bad enough there wouldn’t be anything for your mom to bury but bones. The FTM commander you hugged looked the other way when you brought him back in your backpack. Milo doesn’t fit in your backpack anymore. Japanese school children.

You’re not allowed to talk about Belgrade, you don’t ever want to talk about Belgrade, and so you push it out of your mind.

The alarm reaches level three, so you step in the transporter to investigate.

It’s dark. You once played a video game about a security officer in some sort of restaurant. You don’t like robots and you don’t like the dark. You’re terrified, but you don’t want to show it. You start looking around, talking on your radio. Current Ops is mostly quiet. There’s only one guy at the desk. He spends most of his time playing video games and doesn’t have time to listen to you.

“This is Nightcrawler, getting it done in the dark.” You quip into the headset. The desk doesn’t even respond, except to insult someone’s mother. He’s not listening.

You start to patrol.

You hear breathing and your heart races. You’re afraid of advancing the tracker and getting someone else sent out. You don’t want to explain how cowardice can accidentally advance the tracker. The enforcers will mock you for weeks. You passed the try-outs to be an enforcer, but your boss can’t spare the time or money to send you to the school. Budget cuts, he says.

You don’t mind too much, you just wanted to wear the cool uniform and carry the SMG. The enforcers don’t seem to like you, anyway. Your social skills have degraded.

You think you see something in your peripheral. You check it out. Nothing. You think you hear breathing. You definitely see a door open and close. You open the door and step through.

An arm grabs you around the neck and throws you to the ground. You see stars. Pain blasts every nerve and ripples through your body. You scream.

The world sparkles and shimmers. Your thoughts vanish, and that’s kind of nice. You have no words. Your mind falls through a trap door and into a vacuum. There is no ground, no language, and no concepts. There is only darkness.

You think for a moment that this is what being dead is like, and things start to come back. A man is sitting on you. Sort of. He’s crouching, holding a rifle. You’re folded between his calf and his thigh and he’s sitting on you. You struggle, so he leans back, cutting off air. You go still. He resumes his original position. It’s hard to breath with his weight on your neck.

The alarm tracker hits four.

You’re still dizzy from the neural disrupter, so you smile and whisper, “Hey.”

He looks down at you like you’re only alive because you aren’t worth the bullet.

“What do they serve in Mexican restaurants in the Middle East?”

He frowns.

_“Inshallahdas.”_

He doesn’t even crack a smile, but he shifts his weight so he’s not crushing you so bad anymore. You still can’t move. He has a partner that’s doing something you can’t see.

You hear someone run past him. He knocks you out again.

When you rise from the dead, you pull yourself to your feet. An enforcer is standing over you. You ask him what happened. He tells you, then starts asking you questions. He orders you to follow him. The alarm tracker is at four. You feel safer with him around, so you follow.

The man with the rifle must have killed somebody. You wonder why he didn’t kill you. Maybe he thought you were funny.

The enforcer throws a canister and you both notice something hiding behind a table. You take up both sides and approach, guns drawn. You see the man with the rifle and a blonde woman.

“Freeze!” You scream. Your heart is racing. The tracker advances in your fear. She jumps at you before you can get a shot off and shoves a volt disrupter into your gut. She holds your wrist in a vice grip and you can’t shoot her. She’s taller and stronger than you, but you try to push her to the ground.

The look on her face makes you absolutely certain you’re about to die and leave poor Milo alone to fend for himself, so you summon the willpower you found in Belgrade and try to stay standing, trying to wrestle her.

Your eyes roll back into your head. They jerk painfully, taking your head with it. Language leaves you. Your breath is quick and shallow. You’re shaking uncontrollably. You can’t scream, all you can do is froth at the mouth. Miraculously, you stay standing. The woman is staring at you in wonder.

Your consciousness is shredding. You can smell that horrible sweet, burning smell, akin to pork. With all of your willpower, you throw yourself off of her, away from her volt disrupter. Your throat is seizing and you can’t breathe. You bounce into a wall and onto the desk. You use it to stand up and try again. You shoot at her and miss. She’s on you like some great, avenging angel. She slams the volt disrupter onto your back.

You go down.

“ARE YOU OKAY?!” An enforcer is shaking you.

“Ugh…What was that?”

“That was the coolest shit I have ever seen!” He wipes the spit from your mouth with his sleeve.

“What?”

Enforcers are usually dicks to you. Why are they being nice? You wonder if you look terrible.

You’re shivering badly from the electricity. Oh, right. You have burn marks on your uniform and on your stomach.

“I have never seen anybody stay standing with a volt disrupter in the gut. You have some sort of enhancement?”

You shake your head; you can’t afford enhancements. You’re saving for Milo. The enforcer helps you to your feet and pulls you into his hip.

“I didn’t know you were that tough! Did you ever see combat?”

You can’t talk about Belgrade, so you shake your head. He says it’s a waste that you’ve never been on a sweep or an op or something, but now your combat cherry’s popped now, so to speak, so maybe he can arrange something.

The thought of more combat makes you sick, but you get paid extra to go on those kinds of things.  

“The intruders are gone.” He explains, “We need to fill out an incident report. I’m going to put you in for enforcer school. That was too fucking cool.”

You don’t get your hopes up. You really need the extra credits, but you doubt your boss will let you go. You still need to finish that report about Tirana; it’s due today. You tell him as much. He pats you on the head and tells you that your boss got jumped by the intruders and got his brain drained, so it’s probably a nonissue for now.

You check your watch. You should be off shift. But now you have to fill out an incident report.

You want to go home and call your mom. You want to hold your dog. You don’t know how many more hugs you’re going to get with him. You can’t afford chemotherapy or surgery. You’re very used to going without, but you literally do not have enough money and maybe money won’t be enough. Japanese school children.

Things got really bad in Belgrade. You crave connection, but you can’t handle people very well; you can predict people, but not a person. You don’t know how they’ll react to you. You don’t trust them. People get mean when the chips are down. You’re a person. The chips are down.

Maybe an op or a sweep won’t be so bad. You tell him to sign you up. He finds that uproariously funny and asks why you two don’t hang out more.

You’re on observation given how much electricity was pumped into you and you take the time to finish the threat assessment for Tirana. You assess the threat as low. You fill out the incident report with shaking hands.

You consider telling your boss that Milo is your child and you’re a single parent. Maybe he’ll be nicer to you. It’s not exactly a lie. He’s the only thing you have to remember Belgrade. He proves that it happened.

You took a lot of pictures in the Balkans, but most of them were deleted during debriefing. You pretty much only had the photos of war memorials left, so you wrote a paper to tie them all together. You loved the stories behind them. Your boss read it when you were working on it during company time and sealed your fate via blackmail.

By the time you get released, the sun is already up. It’s beautiful and blinding. You forgot how blue the sky was.  

You go home.


End file.
